Tag: indie

Link Roundup, 4/17/2022

Bear And Breakfast

Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter: 22 Games To Look Forward To In 2022. They are: The Garden Path, Venba, Citizen Sleeper, Call Me Cera, Dordogne, Serial Cleaners, Frank And Drake, Chinatown Detective Agency, Spirit Swap: Lowfi Beats To Match-3 To, Mothmen 1966, A Shiba Story, Validate: Struggling Singles In Your Area, Super Space Club, She Dreams Elsewhere, Hindsight, Norco, Terra Nil, Card Shark, Bear And Breakfast, Afterlove EP, Silt, and Thirsty Suitors. Descriptions and videos are in the article!

Looking back over their history, and forward to that Metaverse thing Zuckerberg things is something new and ground breaking, is Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse. That’s from an Atlantic newsletter. You might be interested in New World Notes, a long-running blog covering Second Life. They linked to an old Daily Show with Jon Stewart piece “covering” Second Life.

Group recreates New York City in Minecraft, part of a project to reconstruct the whole damn world.

Polygon’s Ben Betoli looks into the Playdate‘s crank control.

Phil Fish on Fez’s 10th Anniversary

Screenshot courtesy my own personal 209.4%, 64 cube, three heart-cube game

Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese got in contact with early indie superstar turned recluse Phil Fish, creator of the brilliant Fez on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the game’s initial publishing.

Fez was eagerly anticipated in development for several years, and Fish was one of the subjects of the movie Indie Game. It was the subject of tremendous applause when released, winning the both the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Eurogamer’s Game of the Year in 2012, as well as Indiecade Best in Show in 2011, . For some idea of how long ago that was, the 2011 winner of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize was freaking Minecraft.

But then, at the height of its popularity, Phil Fish got into an argument on the center of all internet strife, that place where sanity goes to die: Twitter. He would cancel Fez’s sequel and swear off game development. He returned briefly in 2014 at what would turn out to be exactly the wrong time, the shameful era of GamerGate, before going underground again.

It was something of a coup that Robert Purchese got an interview with him. If I had known it was something one could just do I might have considered it myself.

Phil Fish’s Fez remains one of the outstanding achievements of the early days of indie game culture, and his being basically hounded out of it during GamerGate remains an egregious travesty.

Indie Gaming: Hyperbolica

The ceiling beams and walls in this screenshot are not curved! They only look warped because they’re in a hyperbolic universe….

I did a Q&A with the creator of Hyperbolica for Game Developer a few months ago. It’s out now, on itch.io and Steam!

It’s really an awesome idea: an exploratory kind of game set in a hyperbolic space. If you’re wondering how someone could even make such a thing, developer CodeParade did a great series of YouTube videos on how he made it. Hyperbolica neatly upsets many of your intuitions of how basic motion and rotation work. It uses the processes of playing video games to communicate ideas in a deeply intuitive way.

If this looks like your kind of thing, you might consider looking into ZenoRogue’s HyperRogue (Steam – Android), which is a one-hit roguelike set on a hyperbolic plane. Or the similarly brain-bending Manifold Garden from William Chyr (Steam – Switch – Xbox – PS Store).